This invention relates generally to social networking, and in particular to assigning users of a social networking system to households for tracking advertising metrics.
Traditional market researchers rely on panels of sample households to track various metrics. For example, a market researcher may identify a household that includes a married couple with one child to represent the consumption and spending habits of a million households based on the metrics surveyed by the market researcher. Advertisers, in an effort to provide relevant advertisements, may use this market research to target their advertisements based on the metrics obtained from these panels of sample households. Market researchers may track these households, which may change in composition and geographic location, using magazine subscriptions, state department of motor vehicle registrations, and voter registration records. As a result, market researchers may effectively estimate how certain demographics, such as males aged 20-24, may react to a certain advertisement based on the past consumption behaviors of the panels of sample households.
In recent years, users of social networking systems have shared their interests and engaged with other users of the social networking systems by sharing photos, real-time status updates, playing social games, and sharing their geographic locations. The amount of information gathered from users is staggering—especially as users have adopted mobile devices that enable users to update their close friends and acquaintances on the social networking system with their locations and interests in real-time, at any hour of the day. Social networking systems have been passively recording this information as part of the user experience, but social networking systems have lacked tools to use market research information in tracking advertising metrics.
Specifically, user information available on a social networking system has not been used to assign users of the social networking system to households relied upon by market researchers. Market researchers that seek to provide insight on how a target demographic of users of a social networking system may react to viewing content, such as watching and interacting with an advertisement for a travel destination, may be unable to identify the users on the social networking system that are included in the households because of privacy issues as well as uncertainty about the authenticity of the users. Consequently, existing systems have not been able to accurately identify sample households of users that may be used to represent populations of users of social networking systems.